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More options blur each one
Working memory has capacity limits, and the cost shows up as blur. In memory experiments the quality of each remembered item drops as more items are added. Two or three alternatives stay sharp. Fifteen or twenty possible solutions are a hard load to hold.
People differ in how they think through a problem. Some love permutations: here is the problem, how many ways could it be solved, down one route A, B, or C, down another D and F, branching like a tree. Others narrow quickly to a favored route with one or two choices left.
A person who sees so many permutations may find the number of choices overwhelming and would rather just listen to an audiobook.
Why does each remembered item get blurrier?
In 2008, Paul Bays and Masud Husain reported in Science that working memory behaves like a limited resource shared among all the items held. Their volunteers remembered the orientation of a few bars on a screen. Precision fell steadily as more bars were added, rather than dropping off sharply at a fixed count. Spreading the resource thinner leaves each item with a fuzzier memory.
How many items can working memory hold?
George Miller proposed in 1956 that people hold about seven items, plus or minus two. Nelson Cowan argued in 2001 that the real limit is closer to four chunks when strategies like rehearsal are blocked. Grouping items into meaningful chunks lets people hold more information within the same limit.
Can too many choices make people buy less?
In a 2000 study, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting table at a grocery store with either 24 jams or 6. About 3 percent of shoppers at the 24-jam table bought a jar, compared with 30 percent at the 6-jam table. Later analyses of many choice-overload experiments, including a 2010 meta-analysis by Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues, found the effect varied widely from one study to the next.
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